One job, done simply

The idea came from Bedtime’s founders, and I designed the app with them. It does one thing. You record a goodnight, send it to a stranger, and listen to the ones sent to you. Each message shows the sender’s first name and their location around the world.

The app only opens after 9pm. That one rule keeps Bedtime tied to the end of the day, instead of becoming one more app to scroll at lunch.

Small by design

A low-poly night landscape sets the mood without getting in the way of the names. Profiles stay short: a name, a city, and a line about yourself. Listeners can send a heart back, and that’s it. No feed, no followers, no streaks.

In early testing, we learned that people liked getting goodnight messages from the opposite sex. So we built a simple algorithm that made an educated guess at each user’s gender from their first name, and used it to send more messages between men and women.

Record a goodnight, send it, hear one back. That’s the whole app, and that was the point.